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Biography of Jack Roosevelt RobinsonName: Jack Roosevelt RobinsonBirth Date: 1919 Death Date: 1972 Place of Birth: N/A Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: baseball player Jack Roosevelt Robinson Jack Roosevelt Robinson (1919-1972) was the first African American of the 20th century to play major league baseball.Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, the son of a sharecropper. After his father deserted his mother, the family moved in 1920 to Los Angeles. Robinson attended Muir Technical High School, where his athletic feats opened college doors. At Pasadena Junior College and at the University of California at Los Angeles, he won acclaim in basketball, football, and baseball. In 1941, when family financial problems forced him to leave the University of California without a degree, he played professional football. In 1942 he enlisted in the Army and in 1943 was commissioned a second lieutenant. He served as a morale officer, and his opposition to racial discrimination led to a court-martial for insubordination, but he was acquitted.In 1944 Robinson began a professional baseball career, playing with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Major …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1956. He died suddenly on October 24, 1972, in Stamford, Connecticut. Associated Organizations Further Reading Five semiautobiographies deal with Robinson's career, of which Carl. T. Rowan with Jackie Robinson, Wait till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson (1960), is a candid portrayal. With other sportswriters Robinson coauthored Jackie Robinson: My Own Story (1948); Jackie Robinson (1950); Baseball Has Done It, edited by Charles Dexter (1964); and Breakthrough to the Big League (1965). Rickey's role in Robinson's breakthrough is described in Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey: American in Action (1957), and Branch Rickey, The American Diamond (1965). Richard Bardolph, The Negro Vanguard (1959), places Robinson's contribution in the context of the black civil rights movement, and David Q. Voigt, American Baseball (2 vols., 1966-1970), places him in the general history of baseball. Fifty years after Robinson broke the color lines in baseball, Arnold Rampersad told Robinson's story in the definitive biography Jackie Robinson (1998). |